knockingat3am

And like clockwork, China isn't even singled out, isn't mentioned first, but instantly it's pointed out how there's really nothing particularly bad going on there, for over half a century. Even bending so far to pretend this is a "controversial subject", and as if most controversial subjects didn't mention China at all. The latter is an easily demonstrable falsehood, uttered in the interest of discussion hygiene. You can't make that shit up -- but I'm sure someone could crawl and visualize it one day. Though I guess one could simply read archives from the 1930s and get the same in more better language.

Other nations may have map issues, but China, in addition to concentration camps, really has map issues.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2128124/marr...

> As for the Marriott employee who “liked” the Twitter post by Friends of Tibet, Smith said disciplinary proceedings had been started. “Due to the mistake of an individual employee, our official [Twitter] account wrongly ‘liked’ the tweet supporting Tibet independence and misled the public. [We] have now suspended this employee and dismissal proceedings are under way,” he was quoted as saying.

Well, except that's not what happened. I couldn't find the one that was originally posted on HN, that article was much better, but this one has the tweet in question:

http://www.hoteliermiddleeast.com/33151-marriott-employee-fi...

He didn't make an "error" even. He liked a positive tweet that thanked them for something he didn't understand and had no instructions about. Off with his head, and everybody do the pre-emptive obedience dance, go! When something like this walks the planet, when something like this feeds, then it's not the worst idea to mention it or things related in spirit to it at every occasion, especially whenever you meet new people or new crowds, as a litmus test.

Just like you might have a dinner party in the early 1930s and, then you mention Nazi violence, and a guest mentions that people have just different ideas about how to best go about internal politics. You smile, thank them for their comment, and never invite them again. You don't "leave politics out" when concerned with serious things, unless you're either putting all your stakes on the Nazis winning and erasing all records, like they would have done in Eastern Europe had they not lost the war, or simply aren't thinking that far. As I said, many historical archives are testament to that kinda being the norm, but culture of the present and last half century, uncountable movies and speeches, kind of seem to suggest it's not the norm we end up thinking fondly of in hindsight. They're not the people we wish we had the courage to be. They're the ones we're ashamed of and euphemize, instead of just mentioning their name and some kind of glow filling our hearts. Oh well.

> a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history

Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions

Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

> Face it: democracy is a sham.

Face it, that does not excuse looking away. You seem to be saying looking away isn't making a difference anyway, so it's not actually looking away. Or maybe that if someone might lose their life when standing up for themselves or someone else, they do not have the option of standing up. Despite many people having proven that wrong.

And you say even those little acts of courage didn't change history, but how you can even know how much worse it would be without those? I'm not accepting that, even though it's an additional discussion to original point, which is that these acts change all of the history of the person doing or not doing them.

Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting. I mean sure, Europe was pretty fucked up, fascists and communists were being ugly either way, I'm not saying it would have been great, but it's still not like that there is some sort of historic force outside of human actions and humans just "align" with it, and it's not as if history selects or even creates a vessel for something it would "do" anyway.

I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but as something that is essential to totalitarianism (this pseudo-scientific view of history and spooky forces greater than the individuals) I just want to drive it home. Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

-- Hannah Arendt

That totalitarianism book is thick, but it's worth it. In an interview 1964 she said:

> When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

This is kinda of what "democracy is a sham, history rolls on" means in practice, ultimately. There's a lot of video footage of the Eichmann trial on YouTube last time I checked, it's very depressing. All it takes for a person to lose themselves is to look away, and all it takes for that to happen is to not think. Not think bad things, just don't (really) think. And if it doesn't matter either way, if history just "rolls on", why would one think, especially about not so nice things?

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm ( http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... )

He totally acknowledges what you say, just like none of what I said implied a denial of it. But that's the starting point, the issue to work on, an issue to exercise agency about, not an excuse for people having no agency. Even if it's just the choice of being tortured to death by Big Brother, or being tortured, agreeing to love Big Brother, and then getting murdered, if you're reading this, you have a lot of choices. Not as many as you deserve, maybe not as many as other people have, but plenty.

At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away.

Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands,

> IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop.

These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak".

But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again:

> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better.

It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.

Relevant in relation to the terms in the search query, not in relation to other search engines.

The Gestapo also didn't solely cause that.

Having a whiff of human decency is not hyper-moralising, it's really just having a whiff of human decency.

> google employees' attempts to sabotage the company's business prospects.

So having concerns about people getting killed for their opinions and whatnot is "hyper-moralising", but having concerns about "backstabbing" your employer isn't. Gotcha.

And it's not even backstabbing. When a friend of yours has a really horrible idea -- and that is putting it hyper-mildly in this context -- you are being more of a friend to them when you try to stop them.